SELF-DETERMINISM AND SANITY

Here is a quote from L.Ron Hubbard. It does have some words you might not understand but it would pay to visit the Scientology Website and find out about these words.

Self-determinism goes up to enormous heights. And it doesn't mean that a person becomes completely indifferent and detached. He can become very, very intimate with existence because he dares to be, at a high level of self-determinism. A person is as sane as he is self-determined.
Now that should be fairly simple. It comes to this degree: Do you know that nobody can be sick unless he has desired to be sick at some time or other? That's very fascinating.

You say to somebody, why, you say, "Nobody can do this. I never wished I was sick—not in my whole life."

And you can always throw him this little curve and it usually throws him, if you get that reaction. You say, "Did you ever try to keep from going to school?"
And he says, "Oh, that. Well, yes, I pretended I was sick a few times then."
"Well, let's remember one of those times." And we find out that he's using this same mechanism to keep from going to work, years later. Only by this time it's developed into what they call a chronic whatever-it-is.

Such a thing as an allergy can develop in this fashion. The little boy is forced to eat something and he says, "I don't like it." Still they insist he eats it, so he says, "It makes me sick" And he says this very emphatically and he argues with it and he loses the argument. Twenty years later you pick him up and you find out very mysteriously that corn makes him sick. Now why should corn make him sick? Well, he said so. He's boss. So he said so, so now it's got to make him sick, because if a person doesn't obey his own postulates he is wrong. The second he doesn't do what his postulate said, then he proves that he is wrong.

And it's an odd thing about rightness and wrongness, but the—as wrong as you can get, of course, is dead. And if you get completely wrong, you're dead. So wrongness is a measure of level on the Tone Scale again. And when a person gets down around 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0, believe me, he can't afford to be wrong! Being wrong just once will finish him—boom!

And yet he's at a level where he's forcing himself to be wrong. And he's in a terrible chaotic state. Below 2.0 a person is more MEST (Matter, Energy, Space and Time) universe than he is—he's more controlled by the MEST universe than he is by himself.
PEOPLE WHO WORRY ABOUT POSTULATES

And so you find that at very low levels on the Tone Scale people worry madly about their own postulates—the second they begin to know about postulates. Then they'll start worrying about postulates and they'll go back and they'll pick up their own postulates. And then they get afraid to make postulates and so on because they can't afford to be wrong.
That is why invalidation of a low-level preclear can be almost fatal—because you tell him he's wrong, invalidate him. You say, "Something is wrong about what you remembered," and he just can't stand that strain.
Now, you can take somebody way up the Tone Scale and you can say, "You're wrong," and you can bring out mathematics, you can bring out Bowditch, you can bring out anything you want to bring out and demonstrate to him conclusively and utterly and forcefully and with harsh words that he is awful wrong. And he will look at it and he'll say, "Yep, I guess I was. What did we have to eat tonight for dinner?" he says, "Let's have some of that." I mean, that's about as much effect as it is. He can afford to be wrong.
—L. Ron Hubbard, from the lecture THOUGHT, EMOTION AND EFFORT.
Excerpted from the Scientology: Milestone One lectures